Lollapalooza Fans Can Dance Till Dawn at Post-Concert Rave

As if 15 bands and 10 or so hours in the heat won't make Monday a full day for young rock fans at Lollapalooza, festival founder Perry Farrell is also inviting them to join an all-night rave at the Shrine Expo Hall afterward. It's one more step toward his goal of making Lollapalooza a 24-hour event.

Farrell and Lollapalooza organizers are sponsoring the dance party, enigmatically dubbed "ENIT," following the first of the two daylong Lollapalooza concerts at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. The elaborate affair will feature video collages, dance music and live performances by techno artists Moby and Traci Lords as well as deejays Sven Vath and Keoki.

"ENIT is more about how people are going to be entertained in the future, and it's more about what I want Lollapalooza to be--an all-night affair with a cabaret, party sort of atmosphere," Farrell said in an interview this week. "I wouldn't say I want to re-create a rave, but I just sort of want to ride the rave wave and the rave vibe. And I want to restructure the way a party goes down."

Farrell's band Porno for Pyros is included in ads for the ENIT show, but he says the group probably won't perform because he doesn't believe its music is "sophisticated enough" for the rave atmosphere of the event.

Though ENIT is part of Lollapalooza, organizers predict that the audience at the Shrine will include both alternative rock fans and dance music fans.

"I think we'll have a lot of people that don't go to [Lollapalooza]," said Philip Blaine, a Los Angeles concert and rave promoter who was asked by Farrell to help organize ENIT. "It's really going to be a whole different crowd and a whole different scene."

Monday's dance party is one of four scheduled on this summer's Lollapalooza run, but a Lollapalooza spokeswoman says it will probably become a regular feature of the annual tour in the future.

The idea for ENIT apparently came from a festival in South America that Farrell read about. It was a celebration held by tribesmen honoring their friendship with extraterrestrials. Word is, the aliens always made it to the party.

"If I can be the first person to start these festivals and bring in another race and introduce them to humans, do you realize what that might mean for the human race?" Farrell says. "The future of [ENIT] goes way beyond Lollapalooza."